On the other hand, in assisting you with continuously storing and processing the “everything else” that you must put aside when crises do emerge, OmniFocus can help make the transition from tactical emergency-mode back into strategic normal-work mode much less painful.) Crisis management lies outside the forte of OmniFocus. (This doesn’t include emergencies, of course! Sometimes things pop up for which we really do need to put everything else aside, because they honestly can’t wait a few hours. (Less than ideally, you’re driving or showering or something when a possible task hits you - but you can hold one or two things in your mental cache until you have a chance to inbox them safely.)Īn inboxed item can wait until you’re ready to focus on your next inbox-processing session, sometime in the next day or three.† At that point - and no sooner - you’ll promote it into a time-deferred project filled with sub-tasks, or recognize it as a ten-minute doddle you can knock off right away, or change your mind about its relevance and just delete it. Ideally, as soon as you perceive the need to get something done - and it could be anything, in any scale or context, from “buy cat food” to “respond to this email” to “deliver this six-month client project” - you can have that noted in your inbox within moments, and then eject it from your active attention, letting you return your focus to your current task. Reduce the friction between yourself and your OmniFocus inbox, minimizing the length of time a newly realized task must sit in your meat-memory. I don’t expect anyone else who relies on the program to use it precisely as I do, so your mileage may very much vary regarding the following list of personal habits and philosophies - except, perhaps, for the first point, which I understand as a core tenet of OmniFocus’s objectively intended use.Īlways Be Capturing. When it all comes together, I really can approach the “mind like water” state that Allen espouses in this talk from 2008*. In a way, OmniFocus reifies GTD, giving you a single place to capture tasks, tie time-and-space contexts to each one, and then forget about them until it’s time to focus on them. While I did read David Allen’s Getting Things Done back when I first started using OmniFocus, I ultimately found it more useful as a backgrounder for the program’s design philosophy than as a guide to using it. I focus here more on overall approaches than on software-specific tips-n-tricks. In recognition of how much this software-assisted cycle has helped me over the years, and in the hope that it may help someone else as well, this article describes several strategies I use when working with this glorified to-do list program. These become the raw materials for actionable tasks that, eventually, wind up on the next day-long shortlist, with all its invitingly empty checkboxes. Between tasks I revisit the app’s Inbox pane, reviewing the jotted-down proto-tasks I’ve recently captured for later cogitation, deciding the next steps for each. In this pattern, I consult the program’s Forecast pane throughout the day, both to whittle down my daily task-list and to build up the next day’s priorities. After so many years, I have found my best approach yet of working with OmniFocus, such that it feels far more like a companionable assistant than a burdensome nag. Today finds me stepping through a pleasantly extended dance with the big purple checkmark on my Mac’s dock. Either way, I always find reason to return and stick with it once again for a long time. Exactly once I took the opportunity of a new major release to declare “OmniFocus bankruptcy”, punting countless stale projects to start fresh with an empty task-database. Not consistently, mind you - more than once I’ve let weeks, even months pass without tending to its lists of lists. I do not exaggerate to say that the Mac edition of OmniFocus has served as the glue of my life as a doer-of-things over this whole span. This year marks my tenth anniversary using OmniFocus, the small family of Mac and iOS productivity applications from the Omni Group.
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